


The Battlemaster's Climb

by Bluefall



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-07
Updated: 2012-09-07
Packaged: 2018-11-30 19:10:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11469861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bluefall/pseuds/Bluefall
Summary: Snapshots from the lifetime of Urdnot Wrex, krogan matriarch.





	The Battlemaster's Climb

At the end of the second summer of Urdnot Wrex's life, she kills a thresher maw.

Bakara and Uta and Vurk are _there_ , of course; if they do not, perhaps, all trust or love each other enough yet to really be krant, they are at least friends, and anyway, they're all of age and there aren't so many thresher maws on Tuchanka that the clan can host a separate Rite of Passage for each of them. But while Bakara is without question the smartest person any of them will ever meet, Uta the most sensible and charismatic, and Vurk the best shot, Wrex is the one with the black poison blessing of eezo clinging to her spine, and Wrex is the one whose tireless, furious warp fields finally tear the monstrous thing so deeply it submits and crashes to the dusty orange soil.

It's been nearly twenty bitter summers since the last Urdnot killed a thresher during the Rite. Vurk is impressed, Uta exhuberant, and Jarrod as proud as Wrex has ever seen him. The grin on his face, the way he claps her shoulder and pours out the ryncol like varren blood for the whole clan, five thousand strong, to celebrate... it reminds her of when she was a hatchling, perched on his hump, cheering at his war stories, but a thousand times better, because this time it's her he's boasting about. He tells every Urdnot who'll listen - which is all of them, because Chieftanship has its privileges - that he's sired a battlemaster, a hero who will shake the stars and make the turians tremble.

But Bakara sits at the long table across from Vurk and watches Wrex in speculative silence, and later, after the fires die down and the hangovers start, Wrex stares into the night, remembers the look on her face, and for no reason she could name, sleeps restless and unsettled.

-)(-

The first Crush Wrex attends is the last for Clan Urdnot as any of them know it. It collects forty-nine clans and concerns the single most dramatic decision made since the Uplift, and yet for all its momentous trappings (the largest Crush in living memory of anyone attending), Uta calls it a formality and speaks nothing but truth. Clan Urdnot has been pulling apart for as long as Wrex has been alive. It's been half a dozen clutch cycles since the women let the men near them when they lay, twice as many since the men were allowed to be there for the hatch. A thousand anonymous eggs is a thousand times safer for every woman involved, to save them the wrath of the men who would blame them for bad luck, trading the power of Shiagur for one in a thousand to gain security for the other nine hundred ninety-nine. Uta says it's better for the men, too, to keep them from fighting each other out of jealousy. Better, she says, to keep the hurt of the genophage distant and faceless for as many as possible.

Bakara says the men could stand to face it a little closer, to make them less eager to waste their stupid lives. The bulk of the krogan do not agree; when the Crush ends, ninety-eight clans leave it, men and women permanently parted. The slow, milling goodbyes last for almost a day, and Jarrod finds Wrex at the very end of it. He's angry, and Wrex realises it's been his default state for a long time. Nedek is now clanchief for the Urdnot women, and Jarrod's goodbye to Wrex is no more than a fierce instruction to be the one to take her place. A divided Urdnot, Jarrod says, will never rise to glory without a battlemaster at both heads.

Years later, she'll look back and know that she was still a child then by how easily and how eagerly she said yes.

-)(-

Time passes even on Tuchanka, and eventually Nedek falls to battle with Clan Jurdon. Around the same time, Bakara gives up her name, Vurk takes up medicine, Uta becomes Chief Scout, and Wrex leads a hundred women and two dozen men in a fast and bloody skirmish that wipes Clan Jurdon from the face of the planet.

Jarrod's grin splits his face at the next Urdnot chief meeting, but to Wrex, it feels strangely hollow; Uta's pointed comments about the size of her scout force in the days after the battle still hang in Wrex's ears and the long, silent look the Shaman-once-Bakara had laid on her while attending the many corpses, Urdnot and Jurdon alike, blanks her vision and dulls the victory. She looks around the male camp and sees a shadow of the Urdnot she remembers. Jarrod growls about glory, the rise of Urdnot, the death of turians and salarians everywhere, but the clan has dwindled in his care. The long tables are empty, the air quiet and still, the tanks and ammunition piles more numerous than houses.

Wrex looks at her father and sees his future. There is blood, and battle, and victory over other clans, scars earned and lives taken and a slow-burning hatred like a blood rage that never really fades, but there is no glory. Not for him. The only thing still in question is whether Clan Urdnot will follow.

-)(-

Wrex limps home from her third Crush with a stomach full of shotgun pellets and a knife covered in her father's blood. Neither are as painful as the truth. Nothing changes. Her father couldn't change to save his clan. The krogan won't change to save their species. No matter how many clans she rallies behind her, every krogan who sees the necessity to put down their guns and breed is just a mask in front of another three determined to kill and die for nothing.

Vurk cuts her carefully apart, picks metal shards out of her body and leaves sutures in their place, repairs organs and slowly eases backup systems to quiescence to prevent overcomp shock and keep her stable. Wrex bears it in silence, the drugs and the suppressed edge of blood rage making a dull haze of her thoughts. In the end, they stare at each other, and Vurk snorts and shakes her head and says Wrex will live, but she'll never have children.

Wrex laughs herself sick, picks up her Graal, and catches the next transport off Tuchanka.

-)(-

Mercenary work is at once more and less satisfying than leading a clan. On the upside, there's no demand, no tedious need to mother idiots through their bad decisions, just the fight and the money after. If she ends up with a bad crew she can just leave them when the job is done. If a contract seems boring she simply doesn't take it. No one's future hangs on her hump except her own and whoever she's pointing a gun at, a luxury few men and no women ever enjoy on Tuchanka. There's no meaning or point to any of it, and so no worry.

On the downside, she misses the power. Aleena tells Wrex about her grand plans for the future - to be a pirate queen, ruling armies of mercenaries with an iron fist, gaining respect and power enough that the whole Terminus knows and fears her name (whatever name she'll be using then, of course, she's changed hers at least twice that Wrex knows about) - and there's certainly an appeal to the idea. Wrex's ambitions are not so grandiose, but there's something to be said for having underlings, someone to answer your demands and anticipate your needs without having to headbutt or pistol whip them every time first.

If there's any other reason to regret leaving home, Wrex doesn't think about it.

-)(-

Aleena is an odd one. She has a mind like a salarian, tricky and circular, guiding an appetite any of the men back on Tuchanka would envy. But she's never careless or cruel; Wrex has never seen her show guilt or hesitation, but if she doesn't need to kill someone she won't, even occasionally when it's inconvenient. It's a rare attitude among mercenaries, and Wrex finds it odd that an asari should have a more healthy krogan attitude toward life than any krogan she's met since she left Kor Urdnot.

Well, not odd. That would suggest it was unexpected, and if there's one thing Wrex has learned in the long years of her life, it's exactly what to expect from her fellow krogan.

She still doesn't take Aleena up on her offer to add sex to their friendship, though. Asari look wrong, feel wrong, smell wrong; they're not krogan, and Wrex will never understand what other krogan manage to find arousing in that. Children, maybe, the promise of a daughter - she can almost understand that urge - but even if that were on offer, or of interest to either of them, something in Wrex revolts at the idea of a child with nothing krogan in her. There's giving up hope, and then there's spitting on it. Wrex can live with the first, but she won't do the second.

Bakara would say that meant she hadn't done either. It's another thing Wrex doesn't think about.

-)(-

When the turians go to war again, Wrex is on Khar'shan. The Council and the batarians have been more and more ill at ease with each other lately, and Wrex is playing bodyguard to the most recent envoy, protecting a salarian diplomat as he politely demands of the batarians just what the hell they're thinking and reminds them they're in violation of Council statutes. Wrex suspects she's there as a reminder of what happens to races that don't toe the Council's line as much as she is to actually protect him. Female krogan are conspicuous by their rarity to anyone who can actually tell them apart from the men, and with that conspicuousness comes the reminder of exactly why so few krogan women leave Tuchanka.

It's not reason enough to turn down a job, not when the money is good and batarians always promise a decent fight, but it does make her smile a little more real when the news comes in that a species barely off its homeworld cleanly slaughtered an entire turian flotilla. Her salarian client looks at her with black disapproval, and she grins all the wider. Perhaps when the Council finally gets sick of the batarians and gives them the same treatment her own people suffered, she'll leave this commission and go work for a turian, see if she can't get a chance to shake a member of this new upstart species by hand.

-)(-

Shepard is —

— human. It's the only word for it. Wrex has met more people than she can count, and she's never met another race with that mix of boldness and bullheaded confidence. Salarians think fast and talk like everything is easy, but they have the sense and caution not to say so to your face. Turians will tell you exactly what they think, but they know the shape of the galaxy and the way things are. Only a human, as far as Wrex has ever known, will walk right up to you and demand to know why you're not at home saving your people from the genophage.

If you care so much, Shepard had said, do something about it. Wrex hadn't realized she did. Hearing her own words about the selfish despair of her people, the pathetic abandonment of the krogan who scattered themselves across a hundred relays to surrender to the genophage and die... When had she started to judge them again? She'd done the same. She'd left, she'd admitted they were right to give in. She says as much to Shepard, and the human, of course, has to know why, has to ask her questions and make her _think_ about all the miserable futility she'd deliberately left behind.

Shepard's eyes aren't wide, or vertical, or red, but the wisdom and the challenge in them is all too familiar, and it's been since before the human's grandparents were born that Wrex last saw it but it somehow cuts no less deep.

She raises her gun to a friend on Virmire, to _krant_ , and the bitter irony is that that friend is the reason she's at all inclined to make a stand to begin with. Or perhaps not so bitter: Shepard makes her a promise, that day on the beach, and soft, short-lived human or no, Wrex somehow believes it.

In turn, Wrex makes a promise of her own. The Reapers will come, and the united strength of the krogan will meet them. Saren falls before Shepard's wrath in a flash of blue and silver with a battlemaster holding the flank, and Wrex shoulders her Graal and heads home.

-)(-

She's grown accustomed to thinking in the asari calendar, during her exile. By the measure of the Citadel Council it's been centuries since Wrex has been home, and as little use as she has for most of their worldview, in this case it does seem more appropriate, somehow, more true, than the mere decades of her own planet's measure.

In her absence, and not remotely to her surprise, Uta has become clan chief of the female clans, ruling over the main encampent on the outskirts of Kor Urdnot with her customary thoughtful reserve and easy charisma. Vurk is openly happy to see Wrex, headbutting her gently and complimenting her new scars, and the Shaman watches her with a friendly smile fighting behind her stern demeanor, but Uta regards her with wary unease, all too conscious of the threat that's just sauntered into her camp. Not a few of the other women circle around the periphery of their strained conversations the first few days she stays there, waiting to see if a play will be made, if Wrex will need backing.

If Jarrod was right about one thing in his life, though, it was that Urdnot would never thrive without a strong krogan at both heads. Uta is steady, responsible, slow to risk lives and mindful of her shaman and her advisors, while the male clans somehow let Wrex's idiot brother rise to power after Jarrod's death. In the end, there's no question of Wrex's first move once she's settled back in. The men are resistant at first, incredulous, aghast, and it takes her months of back-alley alliances and wasteful shows of strength and dozens upon dozens of cracked skullplates, but in the end, she's still the battlemaster who killed the Thresher Maw, still the warlord daughter of Urdnot Jarrod and the meanest and stubbornest varrenspawn any of them have ever met, and the only krogan on Tuchanka with a real plan to fight the genophage, and there was never any question of whose hump would rest on the concrete throne of rubble at Kor Urdnot's center.

Spring has just begun in the southern hemisphere when Wrex settles in as male Urdnot clan chief. The female shaman is quick to make note of the symbolism, and Wrex is equally quick to express that of all the things she didn't miss while in exile, shamans were the top of the list. It doesn't stop the blasted woman smirking for a minute.

-)(-

She doesn't pay much attention to the salarian doctor when he walks into her camp with his nervous smell and his twitchy hands. He offers death and calls it hope; promises a cure at the cost of her people, asking she give him test subjects whose safety he makes no pretense of ensuring. She lets the hunters chase him out of Urdnot for sport and forgets him.

It is a mistake she has a great deal of time to berate herself for, later, when Uta says that a dozen of her people have been taken by Clan Weyrloc. To all appearances it's merely a breeding raid, one of the various ugly practices Wrex has put at the forefront of her policies to stamp out, and the men murmur about a counterattack. Weyrloc is the only clan left on the continent with both the will and the power to oppose Urdnot, and they'll have to be dealt with eventually. Retaliation for such an impressive insult seems the perfect excuse.

But Wrex goes to the site with her hunters, and there are no Weyrloc bodies, no Weyrloc blood. The men may have forgotten what Urdnot women are like, may have forgotten who she herself is, but Wrex has not. Tursek, Koro, Indura, the _damn female shaman_ , they are not asari infants who fall screaming in front of a growling varren. They are krogan, they are Urdnot, and if they left no Weyrloc bodies, they left by choice.

When Shepard walks out of the Void and into her camp like it was a stroll along the Presidium, Wrex sends the human after Weyrloc, after the salarian doctor who Wrex knows in her plates is at fault, and tells herself that she hopes for nothing more than revenge. But when the Normandy's crew strides back into camp with a lone male scout trailing confused behind them, she still can't spit the taste of bile off her tongue.

-)(-

When the Reapers come, Shepard calls on Wrex to keep her promise, and she can't. She has a very long life to look back on, and she's not sure anything in it has ever galled her so badly. Two-thirds of Tuchanka owe fealty to Urdnot now, to lesser or greater degrees, and Wrex would send them all to Palaven without a second thought — this is their time, this is what the krogan were _made_ for — but she and Shepard both know that two-thirds of Tuchanka is nothing resembling the true strength of her people, nothing like what will be needed to fight this war.

She can think of only one thing that could call them all back home, one thing alone that could unite the krogan once more, and the turian and the salarian are right, there isn't time for this, but they have no choice. For Wrex's promise to be kept, so must Shepard's. The genophage will be cured, and the krogan will rise.

-)(-

Wrex lands the shuttle and steps out to look into the pod, into the face of the last of the taken Urdnot women, into her people's future.

It's the female shaman, of course.

Wrex's relief is short-lived, her fury incandescent. She's barely helped the woman down from the pod before she's demanding an explanation for her defection to Weyrloc. The shaman is just as krogan as Wrex, her anger just as quick, and she growls with more force and volume than her injuries should permit that they never betrayed Urdnot, that they would have returned once they had the cure, that they would never have let Weyrloc Guld have sole mastery of such a miracle. Wrex points out quite fairly that it wouldn't have been their choice, that the shaman could claim the ability to take care of herself all she liked but it would never look any less ridiculous after Wrex had had to send Shepard to rescue her.

The shaman headbutts her and stomps off to the shuttle. It's not the most productive conversation they've ever had, and Wrex is pretty sure that under the human's carefully still facial expression, Shepard is laughing.

But all the same, under the sharp glare she shoots her friend and the tense silence of the shuttle back to the ship, Wrex still churns with a fierce bubbling _joy_ , the likes of which she hasn't felt since the day she first called herself Urdnot.

-)(-

The salarian calls her "the female" and "Eve" and were it not for Shepard, Wrex would rip him apart with her teeth. She is a _shaman_ , the highest station a krogan can hold, a conduit for the rage and pain of her people, a title earned in blood and agony. Not during the Ritual of Circles, the mere formality of ceremonial suffering that the men call worse than death, no. She earned the title the day she held an egg in her hands — an egg she had turned and rotated, warmed beneath the sun and the nursing lamps, sung to and murmured at and watched grow and speckle in a handmade nest — and found it soft and cold and lifeless. No name, no rank, no hollow words like "battlemaster" or "warlord" or "clan chief" can compare to that. The salarian's precious title of "doctor" wasn't bought a quarter so dearly, and if he has no sense of the proper respect for his betters Wrex will happily teach him.

The shaman, of course, adores him, and reprimands Wrex for so much as glaring rudely.

The one bright spot in the whole mess is Okeer's whelp. Wrex remembers Shepard's description of him before his Rite — arrogance, anger, the edge of sadism and violence for violence's sake, contempt for the weak rather than simple disinterest in a lack of challenge, every prejudice and cliche that followed her through all the years of her exile — and she knew him for what he was; not the future of the krogan, but their present, the destructive dream of Jarrod and Okeer that she was spending everything in trying to make instead a forgotten past. But he's calm, now, disciplined, a solid presence at Shepard's back who speaks little and watches everything, regards the shaman with respect and awe and volunteers to give the salarian his needed tissue sample with quiet pride rather than baseless boasting.

Somehow Shepard has made a man of him, true promise of the best of her people wrestled out of a thing deliberately designed to be the worst. She thanks Shepard, awkwardly, tries to explain that the boy gives her hope for the krogan.

Odd, says Shepard, I was just thinking that about you.

-)(-

They park the tomka as close as they dare and stare awed as Kalros screams and slams into the Reaper, as the machine wails out its agonized death cry and crumples before the living wrath of Tuchanka. The Shroud lights up in gold and flame, and Wrex is not given to flights of fancy or flowery metaphor but just for a moment, it feels like the whole planet _sings_.

It's not right, that she isn't there. That she's kilometers away when the galaxy ends and begins anew. But Shepard would never have done this, would never have made or kept this promise for her father or her brother; Shepard is blood, Shepard is krant, and Shepard is there. It is enough.

Wrex watches the world open up in front of her, uncertain and wide, a new galaxy for a new krogan people, and for the first time, she turns toward it, and welcomes the future with open arms.

-)(-

Bakara has taken her name back.

Children play on the dusty streets, a krogan sits on the Citadel Council, green blooms on Tuchanka, and yet for all the miracles around them, it is that one tiny detail that keeps sticking in Wrex's mind, keeps reminding her that the world is forever changed.

She mentions it, to Bakara, or perhaps they're talking about water distribution, or clan gossip, or Shepard — Wrex will never remember, because all thought flees completely from her mind like a thresher maw flattened her hump when Bakara interrupts their conversation to impulsively tuck her skullplate up under Wrex's neck.

She's laughing, friendly and just… _happy_ , when Wrex finally manages to stammer out a baffled protest. It doesn't make sense. She cannot give Bakara children. Even with the cure, she cannot give _anyone_ children.

Bakara gives her a gentle headbutt and tucks back up under her neck again. You have given _everyone_ children, she says.

Wrex presses her chin down lightly, and finally knows she's come home.

**Author's Note:**

> Written forever ago in response to a [kmeme prompt](http://masseffectkink.livejournal.com/4611.html?thread=15850499#t15850499) and a discussion on the masseffect LJ comm a little prior. The gist was that seeing Wrex in ME3 was cool and all, but there was something a little gross about the whole patriarchal oat-sowing of Wrex, Literal Father Of The New Krogan Race and wouldn't it be more interesting if he were a) incapable of personally spermifying the entire krogan species and b) a woman and therefore not culturally burdened with weird virility bullshit. And thus, here we are.


End file.
